'Amanda Knox' Directors On Viewing The Iconic Case Through A 'Cultural Lens' [Q and A]

Do you think you’ve heard everything about Amanda Knox? Wait, you remember her, right? The 20-year-old American living abroad in a small coastal community in Italy who was at first wrongly convicted and then acquitted of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, a 22-year-old British foreign-exchange student? The case became a tabloid sensation across the world that involved commentary from global leaders and newspaper headlines and online article titles that one day will be used as examples of the worst in clickbait “journalism.” If that media deluge has left you feeling unsure of whether Ms. Knox is innocent or not (she clearly is, by the way), then Rod Blackhurt and Brian McGinn’s new documentary “Amanda Knox” is something you might want to check out.

READ MORE: The 20 Best Documentaries Of 2016 So Far

The Netflix production is mostly a talking-head doc featuring stand-alone interviews with Knox, her boyfriend at the time Raffaele Sollecito (also wrongly convicted); Italian prosecutor Giuliano Mignini; and tabloid reporter Nick Pisa, who originally “covered” the story for London’s The Daily Mail, among other outlets. It doesn’t necessarily present any major revelations, but allows the participants to speak about the events outside of the context of network news interviews in badly lit hotel suites. And, historically, it’s probably the most concise recap of the events told with the most impartial perspective to date.

Last week, directors Blackhurt and McGinn sat down for an entertaining conversation about the making of the documentary and their belief that audiences’ prejudices still influence how they view the case.

Q: How did this project come your way?

Brian McGinn: A freelance journalist approached me about this documentary I’d made about this guy who had the most Guinness records of all time and was like, ‘Hey, are you interested in the Amanda Knox case?’ because I think all of us had been following it. It was impossible to not have heard of it and not followed it a little bit. So, Rod and I partnered up on it and the thing that was immediately compelling about it was that you had this kind of tragic event that had become this incredible worldwide sensation. I think it’s relatively rare for one of these stories to transcend a news cycle or two — and to stick around in the collective psyche of all these countries and the media. So, it seemed like there was something there to investigate from a psychological point of view and also a human point of view, because there was no access to all these people who were at the heart of it at that time. Amanda and Raffaele were in prison. Giuliano Mignini, the prosecutor, wasn’t speaking…

Q: Oh, you started that long ago?

McGinn: We started in 2011.
Rod Blackhurst: And they were still in jail.
McGinn: So, we started researching, but we didn’t have access to anyone, so we kind of decide we only wanted to make the movie unless we had first-person access to [the right] people. So, it wasn’t until 2014 that we started actually doing these interviews that formed the foundation of the film.

Q: Who was the first person you got to commit to being interviewed and what made you realize you could pull this off?

Blackhurst: Amanda was the first person we interviewed, but when we went to Italy in 2011, she and Raffaele were in their first trial and we met Amanda after she was acquitted. We met her in Seattle, but it took her two years for her to decide that she wanted to tell her story. And in that time period, I don’t think we knew we were going to be able to make a film. We were very hands-off because so many people had been approaching her or Raffaele or Mignini in a certain way. And our approach was, ‘We are here if you want to talk to us’ and I don’t think we knew we were going to have a film until after we did that first interview with Amanda and we saw so much in the way she took a bird’s-eye perspective and look back at all these events and all these moments. And we understood that ‘Oh, there is something really compelling here about the human experience as it relates to these things that people only saw a little bit of but they had no actual understanding … of the events themselves.’
McGinn: But then we honestly didn’t have a movie until Giuliano Mignini came on board in 2015.

Q: So you don’t think you could have made it just with Amanda?

McGinn: I don’t think it would have been nearly as interesting. I think what makes the film — from my point of view, at least — what makes the film compelling is you have this panoply of perspectives and it comes from having both sides talking. And I think if we had not been able to get the trust of all these different parties, I think it would have been not as interesting a film. When we interviewed Amanda , we weren’t even sure we wanted to make it a feature or if it was worthy of that. I think it was as we started hearing all these different versions of things that it was a bigger story than just her telling her side of the events.

Q: Why do you think she trusted you guys? Granted, she’d done a whole bunch of network interviews over the years, but why do you think she said, ‘Oh, these are the two guys I want to talk to’?

Blackhurst: It was because we made some comedy videos. (Laughs) We said we like to listen, and I think a lot of people had been looking at her and also the story in general through the lens that they already felt compelled to examine and we wanted to take the time to get to know her just like we wanted to take the time to get to know Giuliano Mignini because these were all real people and that had been lost. All of them felt no one had given them the time to do that. Giuliano told us he’d given an interview to CNN that was a very lengthy interview, maybe several hours, and it had been reduced down to 90 seconds of sound bites and he felt sort of betrayed by the process of it. So, when we approached him and said, ‘This is our point of view as filmmakers. This is the sort of film we want to make.’ And when he saw we were actually carrying that out — and Amanda saw that as well — I think they responded and they kept working with us. We filmed them all several times. There are different visual moments that we filmed with them that we didn’t film all at once. It was over the course of two years.
McGinn: The hands-off thing is really the most important thing to access because everyone was coming at them trying to get that scoop right way. And we kind of said, ‘Hey, we’re interested. Here’s the approach we’ll take. Give us a call if you’re interested.’ I have no idea what anyone else was doing, but I would guess that was the complete opposite of the approach [of other documentary filmmakers].

Q: It’s interesting because I’m not sure Giuliano Mignini should have spoken to you guys. He comes off as an idiot.

McGinn: I think you’re looking at him through a cultural lens. In that what is so interesting about this story is that everyone comes at it with this baggage that from the way they come at the story or their background. There are so many different elements that influence how you see the story. What was interesting to us was, ‘Why do we come at these kind of stories with that idea?’

Q: Sure, but — not trying to sound like an ass — but as someone who has traveled all around the world and has seen a ton of stuff, you listen to him, and his justifications of what he’s saying are so narrow. It’s like, ‘Oh, in the little town I grew up in, men would never cover up a dead body…’ I don’t think he realizes that, but how he talks about her is very misogynistic. Isn’t there a line where it stops being how we all interpret it and simply the truth?

Blackhurst: It just doesn’t play out in that situation. It plays out how the story is presented in the media. Calling Amanda a ‘man-eater’ or a ‘diabolical sex addict’ or trying to judge her by the fact a woman should have x amount of lovers or whether she’s into crazy sex. What does that say about her? But that’s because, again, people are looking at it through based on what they believe. Hearing Mignini talk about it and then hearing Amanda talk about it through her own words, you see this “Rashomon” effect play out where they all have these different versions of that moment, that truth, and that was interesting because that was lost in this back-and-forth because people were far more focused on the narrative later that had been applied to this story. We weren’t able to understand who these people were as individuals going through each of these moments because we didn’t have access. No one did.
McGinn: It’s also interesting to hear Mignini’s point of view. I think it’s enlightening to hear each of those perspectives because it does reveal so much about them as people and how a story like this can explode in that manner. There are so many different components that sort of collide together to create that. Being able to reveal that without judging them for it was important to us.

Q: I know you guys screened at Toronto, but only critics have really seen it beyond that. And I guess my perspective is when people see it on Netflix and respond to you both on Twitter or social media, a common reaction will be, ‘Omigod, that freakin’ prosecutor is an ass.’ He’s a villain.

McGinn: But I would say what’s so interesting about this story, the nature of it, is that the world is still split. So, I think you might be looking at it at the point of view that has been pervasive in the American media. But if you go to Europe, you’ll find a totally different point of view. I think that is a really interesting phenomenon.
Blackhurst: Because the way Giuliano Mignini sees the situation, we would meet other people in Italy who felt the same way because of his background, his upbringing, whatever it may be and that, though, gets instantly turned into this ‘us vs. them’ thing. Everyone has their own judgments or preconceived notions of things or moral compass that is directing the way they want to judge or consume something. Then that gets exacerbated and magnified and turned into this compelling media narrative that is all designed to get us to click on articles.
McGinn: There is a decent amount of punditry in the movie and it was so interesting in editing the film to see how far from the kind of basic interview the story went. I mean, it got to a point where there was actually a battle in the media over Donald Trump saying we should never go to Italy again. And then Italians saying, ‘Well, Hillary Clinton is coming in and the Americans are telling us what to think and do!’ So, there was an interesting kind of meta layer to it that became a cultural battle, which is why I think it became such a big phenomenon. It’s that and the girl-on-girl crime stuff that Nick Pisa talks about. It’s romantic Italy being turned a horror set in many ways. There were a lot of these elements that let it play into being this sort of sensation.

Q: I have three quick questions to ask you. And please do not be offended at the first, but people are going to ask and what to know: Did Amanda get any compensation for participating?

McGinn: No, no one got compensation. We want to underline that a million times.
Blackhurst: Right.
McGinn: This is something a lot of people are curious about. Amanda was not compensated to be in the movie.
Blackhurst: Nobody was.

Q: Why do you think she ultimately did it? Knowing she’d done all these interviews…

McGinn: I think she’d done a lot of television interviews and I don’t think she’d ever done an interview in this fashion before. I think a lot of the interviews a lot of people had done were sort of the traditional point/counterpoint ‘Why did this happen? Why did that happen?’ type of interviews and that was really not the approach of our movie. I think the reason why everyone’s hopefully open and honest in the film is because we are not confronting anyone and I hope you can see that. We are letting them kind of reveal to you who they are and I think over the course of that, you can get a sense of what happened.
Blackhurst: And on top of that, the agenda is not just getting something out the next day, getting something on the evening news. It was this long-lead approach to weaving through the years and understanding how they grew and changed as people. And for her and also for Giuliano Mignini, people have these assessments of them because people had not had a chance to hear from them in their own words.
McGinn: That approach tied into digging into the case and the evidence itself. I think it took nine months to get access to the court files. And once we actually got into the material, there was all sorts of stuff we don’t think anyone has seen before. In fact, the prosecutor himself said he didn’t think he’d seen the footage of Meredith Amanda had shot of her with her own video camera which was in the court files. There were all these things that — once we had the time to do it as opposed to having to turn around something quickly? We started finding things that were really surprising and give a little bit perspective on the case.

Q: You guys worked on this for years. Was there any storylines or scenes you had to cut to make it work as a movie?

Blackhurst: The hardest part is to make it a movie. To cut it into something that’s 90 minutes. I think we wanted to bring people on the journey to get them to feel as though they traveled to Perugia or Seattle. I think the hardest part for us was condensing all that down. And we grounded all of the legal evidence and all of the legal conclusions the happened through the course of those eight years, the most important pieces of the evidence as it pertained to all those legal conclusions.
McGinn: Are there things we would have liked to keep in? I think the most important thing we did was to take out the sort of chaff. This is a story that became sort of layered on with so many layers of stuff. I should say the process was more sculpting and removing all the access and I think one of the strengths of the film is that it’s clear and concise and 90 minutes and you actually understand the fundamental turning points of the story.

“Amanda Knox” is now available to stream on Netflix.

For more Oscar news and insight follow Gregory Ellwood on Twitter @TheGregoryE.